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Yemeni Rebels and Saudis Clash at Border

BEIRUT, Lebanon — As clashes continued Friday between the Saudi military and Yemeni rebels on the remote border between the countries, both sides claimed to have inflicted casualties and captured enemy soldiers.

The conflict started early this week when the Houthi rebels — who have been fighting the Yemeni government for more than five years — killed a Saudi border guard and wounded 11 others, bringing Saudi Arabia into the war for the first time. The Houthis said that they were acting in self-defense and that the Saudis had been helping the Yemeni government in its renewed campaign to crush the rebellion.

On Friday, Saudi military officials said that they had captured 50 of the rebels and that Houthi shelling of a village near the war zone had killed four women.

But the Houthis also claimed to have captured Saudi soldiers. A Houthi spokesman, Muhammad Abdel Salam, told Al Jazeera that the rebels would carry out interviews with the captured soldiers for the news media, but would treat them with respect.

Local people in the border area said they had seen and heard Saudi fighter jets bombing rebel positions throughout Thursday and early Friday, in an area just over the Saudi border known as Jebel Dukhan.

The fighting represents a sharp escalation of the Houthi rebellion, which has flickered on and off in Yemen’s remote and mountainous northwest since 2004, rarely receiving much notice from the foreign press.

Saudi Arabia has long been concerned about the Houthis, who began as a tiny insurgency but have gained allies in northern Yemen over the years. The Houthis are Zaydis, a branch of Shiite Islam, while most Saudis practice a form of Sunni Islam that is hostile to Shiites.

The Houthis are also extremely hostile to the United States — their signature chant is “Death to America, death to Israel, God is great” — and they accuse the governments of Yemen and Saudi Arabia of being American pawns.

Yemen accuses Iran of supporting the Houthis, feeding concerns of a possible new proxy war in the region between Saudi Arabia and Iran.